• “Inferno, Dan Brown’s new book about Dante, is coming out on May 14, 2013 from Doubleday in the U.S., and Transworld Publishers in the UK (a division of Random House). Brown announced that he was writing something new in May 2012. Though Brown had been cryptic about the topic of the book, he has now… [Continue Reading]

    Dan Brown, <em>Inferno</em> (2013)

  • ” ‘What infinite use Dante would have made of the Bowery!’ Theodore Roosevelt declared in 1913.” Quoted in an article about the Bowery in NYC. Sam Roberts, The New York Times, April 17, 2013

    The Bowery in NYC, 1913

  • Vulture.com, October 25, 2012 Contributed by Rebecca Ruquist See also: “Why Is Don Draper Reading The Inferno?” “A few photos from the filming of the sixth season of Mad Men hit the web today, and one of them showed Don Draper indulging in a not-so-light beach read alongside his wife, Megan. The book? Dante’s Inferno.… [Continue Reading]

    Dante in <em>Mad Men</em>

  • “IN 1999, as a writer for The American Prospect, I went into a slaughterhouse undercover, with the help of some rebellious employees. The floor was slick with the residue of blood and suet, and the air smelled like iron. A part of my brain spent the whole time trying to remember which of Dante’s circles… [Continue Reading]

    Open the Slaughterhouses

  • Digital reconstruction of “Pluto’s Gate” (Francesco D’Andria) “It sounds like something out of a horror movie. But Italian scientists say that the “Gate to Hell” is the real deal—poisonous vapors and all.  The announcement of the finding of the ruins of Pluto’s Gate (Plutonium in Latin) at an archeology conference in Turkey last month, was… [Continue Reading]

    Scientists reportedly discover gate to hell (Turkey)

Categories of Sightings

About this Project

This experimental website, inspired by students of Arielle Saiber’s “Dante’s Divine Comedy” course, has been built to archive occurrences of Dante and his works in popular and contemporary culture of the twentieth century and beyond. The site catalogs a wide range of Dante "sightings": from the cursory to the extensive, and from a place of superficial knowledge of Dante and his works to deep familiarity with them. We leave to the readers the opportunity to judge the nature of each citing, and note the frequency of certain themes over others. The goals are twofold: 1) to provide a central access point for said references; and 2) to offer data that students and scholars of Dante can use to think about the Nachleben (“afterlife”) of Dante’s works in relation to reception theory, resonance, and cultural studies.